Milestones: 1937–1945

Bretton Woods-GATT, 1941–1947

During and immediately after the Second World War, the United States, the United
Kingdom, and other allied nations engaged in a series of negotiations to
establish the rules for the postwar international economy. The result was the
creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the July 1944
Bretton Woods Conference and the signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade at an international conference in Geneva in October 1947.

Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes at the inaugural meeting of the
International Monetary Fund’s Board of Governors, March 8, 1946.
(International Monetary Fund)

The lessons drawn by U.S. policymakers from the interwar period informed their
approach to the postwar global economy. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt and officials such as Secretary of State
Cordell Hull were adherents of the Wilsonian belief
that free trade promoted not just prosperity, but also peace. The experience of
the 1930s certainly suggested as much. The policies adopted by governments to
combat the Great Depression—high tariffs, competitive currency devaluations,
discriminatory trading blocs—helped destabilize the international environment
without improving the economic situation. This experience led leaders throughout
the anti-Axis United Nations alliance to conclude that economic cooperation was
the only way to achieve both peace and prosperity, at home and abroad.

This vision was articulated in the Atlantic Charter, issued by Roosevelt and
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the conclusion
of the August 1941 Atlantic Conference. The Charter’s fourth point committed the
United States and the United Kingdom “to further the enjoyment by all States,
great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade
and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic
prosperity,” while its fifth point expressed their commitment to “the fullest
collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of
securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social
security.” The two countries elaborated upon these principles in Article VII of
their February 1942 agreement on lend-lease aid. In that article, the United
Kingdom agreed that in return for U.S. lend-lease assistance, it would cooperate
with the United States in devising measures to expand “production, employment,
and the exchange and consumption of goods,” to eliminate “all forms of
discriminatory treatment in international commerce,” to reduce barriers to
trade, and generally to achieve the goals laid out in the Atlantic Charter.

By early 1942, U.S. and British officials began preparing proposals that would
foster economic stability and prosperity in the postwar world. Harry
Dexter White, Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury, and John Maynard Keynes, an advisor to the
British Treasury, each drafted plans creating organizations that would provide
financial assistance to countries experiencing short-term balance of payments
deficits; this assistance was meant to ensure that such countries did not adopt
protectionist or predatory economic policies to improve their balance of
payments position. While both plans envisioned a world of fixed exchange rates,
believed to be more conducive to the expansion of international trade than
floating exchange rates, they differed in several significant respects. As a
result, from 1942 until 1944, bilateral and multilateral meetings of allied
financial experts were held in order to settle upon a common approach. Agreement
was finally reached at the July 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial
Conference, a gathering of delegates from 44 nations that met in Bretton Woods,
New Hampshire. The two major accomplishments of the Bretton Woods conference
were the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonly known as the World
Bank. The IMF was charged with overseeing a system of fixed exchange rates
centered on the U.S. dollar and gold, serving as a forum for consultation and
cooperation and a provider of short-term financial assistance to countries
experiencing temporary deficits in their balance of payments. The IBRD was
responsible for providing financial assistance for the reconstruction of
war-ravaged nations and the economic development of less developed countries. In
July 1945, Congress passed the Bretton Woods Agreements Act, authorizing U.S.
entry into the IMF and World Bank, and the two organizations officially came
into existence five months later. The fixed exchange rate system established at
Bretton Woods endured for the better part of three decades; only after the
exchange crises of August 1971, when President Richard M.
Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, and
February/March 1973 did floating exchange rates become the norm for the major
industrialized democracies.

Agreement on international trade proved more difficult to achieve. One of the
most contentious issues was the system of preferential tariffs established among
the members of the British Commonwealth in 1932, whereby trade within the
Commonwealth was subject to lower tariffs than trade between the Commonwealth
nations and the rest of the world. U.S. officials such as Cordell Hull opposed
imperial preferences on both ideological and practical grounds—the United
Kingdom and Canada, both members of the system, were the United States’ two
largest trading partners—and called for their abolition; however, many U.K. and
other Commonwealth officials favored keeping the preferences, at least until the
United States agreed to reduce the high Smoot-Hawley tariffs set in 1930. After
more than four years of negotiations on this and other issues—such as the rules
that would govern tariff negotiations and the structure of a proposed new
organization to oversee international trade—agreement was finally reached in
1947. Twenty-three nations meeting in Geneva from April to October 1947
concluded the first postwar round of tariff negotiations, leading to reductions
in tariffs and imperial preferences, as well as a draft charter for a new
institution, the International Trade Organization (ITO). Participants also
signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), designed not only to
implement the agreed tariff cuts but to serve as an interim codification of the
rules governing commercial relations among its signatories until the ITO was
created. In November 1947, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment
convened in Havana to consider the draft ITO charter; four months of
negotiations later, the representatives of 53 countries signed the finished
charter in March 1948. However, strong opposition in the U.S. Congress meant
that the ITO never came into existence. Instead, it was the GATT that governed
postwar international trade relations for almost fifty years. Under the GATT’s
aegis, eight rounds of trade negotiations resulted in significant tariff
reductions among its members before it was superseded by the World Trade
Organization in 1995.